November 30, 2001

Got quite a bit of coding done yesterday. First, I worked on the address bar problem in Scope again and came to the conclusion that the IEAddress component that I was using was the culprit for the erratic behaviour that I was seeing. I even wrote a testbed application that simply had just that one component on it and it was still behaving the same way that it did in Scope. I took a look at the source and found at least a couple of places which contributed to the problem but wasn’t sure that removing those lines of code was the best option … so, I decided to write a component of my own :p The IEAddress component was based on the Delphi ComboBox component and so was doing a lot of work to support the inclusion of icons in the combobox – I decided to go with the ComboBoxEx component (which is there in Delphi 6.0 but I’m not sure whether it was there from 5.0 downwards …) and save myself the trouble of handling the icon drawing and stuff. In the end, I ended up with a component which did what I wanted and had a few customized features just for Scope. If you are interested to see the current progress (or are really not happy with the address bar <g>), you can find a build here – but be warned, this is very early code still and while I am using the same build, I can fix problems if I see them – you can’t :p

jugg checked out the new build and pointed out the fact that you couldn’t use TAB while in the auto-suggest dropdown for the address bar. I’d noticed the option in the SHAutocomplete API call and had been intending to add it myself but had forgotten … I did try it now but found that it didn’t seem to work under Delphi – bummer 🙁 I want to do some further investigating to make sure that it doesn’t work under Delphi and it is not something that I’m missing. Plus, I want to look into the problems that the latest build seems to have with the latest release of Mozilla – that should keep me busy 🙂

My coding efforts were not over yesterday though :p I had noticed that typing in Blog seemed to be getting a bit slower – at least for me. I wasn’t sure whether this was the live-spellchecking in the later versions of Blog or the fact that I had so many entries in Blog that it was slowing down (since I’ve been posting since around March 2001, mine has to be the biggest blog around that uses Blog :p) I went on the latter hypothesis and did some code to improve the way records are selected in Blog in case it was the filtering that was at fault but today I see that Blog still seems to be sluggish. I need to look into this a bit further as well – probably the easiest thing would be to simply turn off live-spellchecking and see if that helps. The problem is that the performance difference is not always noticeable and so it might all be just subjective opinion …

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Posted by Fahim at 6:07 am  |  5 Comments